I'm not sure where to put this, since it's as much science as it is history. I've recently finished teaching 'Paleohistory', basically a precursor to formal history. I wanted to teach history starting from really ancient things and working up to more modern, so they could see how things built up on each other, but I found that to do this I kept needing to start earlier and earlier until the Big Bang came up.

Paleohistory is basically a short subject that gives a conceptual overview of the Big Bang, the formation of stars, galaxies, and planets (including Earth), and an overview of the various Eons of Earth's history, all the cool critters that were around, and the eventual development of humans. We didn't go into too much depth (it was only 30 lessons and could easily be reduced to just 12), but we did look at fossils, extinctions, ice ages, and a few specific types of animals like dinosaurs, trilobites, and mammoths.

The point of it was to emphasise our place both in time and space, and to have a better understanding of the development of life in general, global climate, and what really makes us human. Finally I wanted to set the scene for proper ancient history, so that things like why people were originally living as nomads and so on were a bit more obvious.

Anyway, has anyone else ever done anything like this? If so, how did you find it and what was your overall impression? And if anyone is interested, all of the materials I used are digital and I am happy to share them.

The Prehistory begins with the fabrication of the tools, approximately 5,000,000 years ago, as conventionally the threshold of Homo is placed at the moment of the fabrication of the extrabody tool. The Prehistory is subdivided in Paleolithic, Neolithic and Mesolithico. The Protohistory, that follows the Prehistory, conventionally embraces the age of the metals, until the invention of the writing, (according to the zones), between the 3000 and 1500 B.C, i.e. until the historical times, that is of the “written history".
It is characterized, in Europe, from the presence of complex social systems, but still substantially prehisthorical, in parallel with the first Mediterranean civilizations. In Italy, the study of this phase is called Palethnology. In particular, the Palethnology studies the interactions between biological and “cultural " characters of the human communities during the time.